On the 23rd of April, 2001, the 6th Workshop on High-Level Parallel P- gramming Models and Supportive Environments (LCTES’98) was held in San Francisco. HIPShas been held over the past six years in conjunction with IPDPS, the Internation Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium. The HIPSworkshop focuses on high-level programming of networks of wo- stations, computing clusters and of massively-parallel machines. Its goal is to bring together researchers working in the areas of applications, language design, compilers, system architecture and programming tools to discuss new devel- ments in programming such systems. In recent years, several standards have emerged with an increasing demand of support for parallel and distributed processing. On one end, message-passing frameworks, such as PVM, MPI and VIA, provide support for basic commu- cation. On the other hand, distributed object standards, such as CORBA and DCOM, provide support for handling remote objects in a client-server fashion but also ensure certain guarantees for the quality of services. The key issues for the success of programming parallel and distributed en- ronments are high-level programming concepts and e?ciency. In addition, other quality categories have to be taken into account, such as scalability, security, bandwidth guarantees and fault tolerance, just to name a few. Today’s challenge is to provide high-level programming concepts without s- ri?cing e?ciency. This is only possible by carefully designing for those concepts and by providing supportive programming environments that facilitate program development and tuning.

HIPS 2003 is a forum for researchers in the areas of applications, computational models, language design, compilers, system architecture, and programming tools to discuss new developments in programming parallel and grid systems. The proceedings covers the design and implementation of high-level programming models for parallel and grid environments. It also looks at current programming models such as MPI and OpenMP and covers implementation techniques for OpenMP on SMP systems.

On the 23rd of April, 2001, the 6th Workshop on High-Level Parallel P- gramming Models and Supportive Environments (LCTES’98) was held in San Francisco. HIPShas been held over the past six years in conjunction with IPDPS, the Internation Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium. The HIPSworkshop focuses on high-level programming of networks of wo- stations, computing clusters and of massively-parallel machines. Its goal is to bring together researchers working in the areas of applications, language design, compilers, system architecture and programming tools to discuss new devel- ments in programming such systems. In recent years, several standards have emerged with an increasing demand of support for parallel and distributed processing. On one end, message-passing frameworks, such as PVM, MPI and VIA, provide support for basic commu- cation. On the other hand, distributed object standards, such as CORBA and DCOM, provide support for handling remote objects in a client-server fashion but also ensure certain guarantees for the quality of services. The key issues for the success of programming parallel and distributed en- ronments are high-level programming concepts and e?ciency. In addition, other quality categories have to be taken into account, such as scalability, security, bandwidth guarantees and fault tolerance, just to name a few. Today’s challenge is to provide high-level programming concepts without s- ri?cing e?ciency. This is only possible by carefully designing for those concepts and by providing supportive programming environments that facilitate program development and tuning.

Creating scientific workflow applications is a very challenging task due to the complexity of the distributed computing environments involved, the complex control and data flow requirements of scientific applications, and the lack of high-level languages and tools support. Particularly, sophisticated expertise in distributed computing is commonly required to determine the software entities to perform computations of workflow tasks, the computers on which workflow tasks are to be executed, the actual execution order of workflow tasks, and the data transfer between them. Qin and Fahringer present a novel workflow language called Abstract Workflow Description Language (AWDL) and the corresponding standards-based, knowledge-enabled tool support, which simplifies the development of scientific workflow applications. AWDL is an XML-based language for describing scientific workflow applications at a high level of abstraction. It is designed in a way that allows users to concentrate on specifying such workflow applications without dealing with either the complexity of distributed computing environments or any specific implementation technology. This research monograph is organized into five parts: overview, programming, optimization, synthesis, and conclusion, and is complemented by an appendix and an extensive reference list. The topics covered in this book will be of interest to both computer science researchers (e.g. in distributed programming, grid computing, or large-scale scientific applications) and domain scientists who need to apply workflow technologies in their work, as well as engineers who want to develop distributed and high-throughput workflow applications, languages and tools.